Matthew, are you still around? Does this feature sounds right to you?: Have an annotation / mapping that will be called @SearchableCascade. This will allow to cascade operation performed on object (even if they are not root searchables) into its properties. For example: @Searchable(root=false) class A { @SearchableCascde B b; } @Searchable class B { @SearchableId int id; @SearchableProperty String text; } In this case, Compass will allow for the following operation to be performed: A a = ... session.save(a); // can be delete and create as well Which will result in cascading B. Naturally, this annotation will be allowed to be used with Set/List and array as return values.